“The king awaits.”

            The attendant’s words burned themselves into Lady Eyreka’s mind. Her hands trembled.  She clasped them tighter together and nodded.  Her mind whirled. Needing to concentrate and remember all she planned to say, she thought of her eldest son, Garrick, and his wife, Jillian. Their love had suffused itself into the very stones of Merewood Keep’s foundations and were at the very heart of her people’s existence.

This was her only chance.

“I cannot fail,” she whispered.  Her family’s home was about to be wrested from their grasp and would be as if all Garrick and Jillian had gone through to rebuild was for naught.

            She took a deep cleansing breath, and hurried to catch up to the young servant. For the second time in her life, she would bargain with the gods in exchange for those she loved. Would this Norman be as eager to accept her as part of the spoils of war as her first husband had?

Her stomach clenched. She was no longer the innocent young woman who had bravely ridden into their enemy’s embrace. She had three grown sons, and the scars to prove it.  In a few months she would reach her fortieth summer.

As she walked along the corridor, she thought of all the reasons the Norman might accept her. The years had been kind to her.  She still had all of her teeth and only a few wrinkles about her eyes. Looking down she frowned at the streaks of gray running through her hair.

Mayhap the years had not been as kind as she thought.

 What man would want her, when he could have a much younger maid for a wife? Her footsteps echoed about her.  Was her plan doomed before she had a chance to offer it? She clamped down on her traitorous thoughts when the attendant paused in front of a closed door. Before she could tell the young man she’d changed her mind, he opened the door with a flourish and bade her enter.

Fear speared through her, but she focused on the sight before her.

            King William sat on a massive oak chair set on a dais. He was larger than she had imagined. His mien was arrogant; his very posture reeking of power. But it was not so much his size, as the fierce frown on his face that terrified her. This man had the power to grant her desire, or have the head lifted from her shoulders with the wave of his hand.

            At his nod to enter, she inclined her head and prayed that her legs would cooperate.  Though they wobbled, she hid that fact by walking slowly toward where he sat. At the edge of the dais, she sank to her knees in homage. 

            While she waited for him to recognize her show of fealty, her mind raced, caught up in a whirlwind of emotion. This man alone was responsible for the death of thousands of good Saxon thanes. Had he given the command to shoot the arrow that had ended her husband’s life?

            She gripped her quaking hands together to still their movement while her stomach churned and a sour, bilious taste surged up her throat, thinking of the ugly wound the Norman arrow had left behind. Though strong threads closed the cauterized wound, ‘twas of no use, the arrow had pierced her husband’s heart. Helpless to do otherwise, she had held her dying husband in her arms, whispering words of prayer to her own Viking gods, and Addison’s Christian God for good measure.